Hacker News Reader

louisstowon A new way to build Trending filters using Elasticsearch

I haven't seen this approach after researching ways to implement a "Trending" query. We get super fast queries over an arbitrary time window at the cost of a slower but highly cacheable threshold calculation query.

louisstowon Techniques scraping vulnerability data from 100 sources (without LLMs)

I wanted to share some of my techniques for managing and scaling 100+ unique web crawlers. I've tried a few approaches but these techniques stand out as having the most impact in terms of quick iteration and being resilient to breaking changes. Interested in hearing different approaches.

louisstowon Ask HN: What side projects landed you a job?

I built an early HTML5 game engine in 2010 called CraftyJS when Facebook games were starting to become big. The project itself got me the job at a gaming startup and an offer at Zynga.

louisstowon Ask HN: Tell us about your project that's not done yet but you want feedback on

https://app.secalerts.co

Our newest vulnerability alert service. We aggregate vulnerability data from over 50 sources into one consistent data schema and allow users to write detailed queries and setup alerting. We've even introduced a pretty good local scanner to keep your SBOM up-to-date.

louisstowon Ask HN: Those making $500+/month on side projects in 2023 – Show and tell

I built SecAlerts https://secalerts.co a few years ago. Fairly straight forward SaaS product to send email alerts on new vulnerabilities matched to customer software.

louisstowon Microsoft Clipchamp

This was originally a startup in Brisbane that was acquired, not a Microsoft name.

louisstowon Ask HN: Favourite open source game?

Lugaru: https://osslugaru.gitlab.io/

louisstowon Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://signals.to

I'm building a cybersecurity database that aggregates vulnerability information from about 100 different sources in one cohesive structured dataset that can be easily queried. It'll be much faster than CVEs and include way more things (remedy information, news, social media, forum, advisories).

louisstowon The QOI File Format Specification

Can someone explain how it's lossless if there's a chance of hash collisions in the index?

louisstowon Show HN: I made a collaborative ASCII editor

Nice! I've been running a similar ASCII based collab tool called https://walloftext.co

louisstowon Slate – A completely customizable framework for building rich text editors

Would second ProseMirror. It was powerful enough for me to build essentially a code editor: https://qworp.com/

louisstowon Does stress impact technical interview performance? (2020) [pdf]

Those are great, I'm more talking about a complex problem you're given and have to whiteboard the solution while making sure not to be silent for too long or you'll interrupted or given a hint.

louisstowon Does stress impact technical interview performance? (2020) [pdf]

My least favourite interview technique has to be "talk me through a complex problem on a whiteboard". It's not so much the stress but the fact that you can't have a train of thought longer than 5 seconds before someone finds the silence awkward or interprets it as you're lost and breaks the silence and train of thought. It's a test for solving complex problems in 5 second blocks while being constantly interrupted.

louisstowon Show HN: Ad Network for Sideprojects

Love the idea. Just signed up https://secalerts.co and added the script to our homepage.

louisstowon Bugtraq: BugTraq Shutdown

This is surprising as it was a somewhat active mailing list. Any known and active replacements?

louisstowon Ask HN: What are you working on?

Got a waiting list I can sub to? Sounds interesting

louisstowon Ask HN: What are you working on?

Working on a platform to collect unstructured security data from a variety of sources and aggregate into structured data that can be queried, monitored and used in various different tools like scanners. No link to show right now though.

louisstowon Google: Open Letter to Australians

Open letter to Australians

We need to let you know about new Government regulation that will hurt how Australians use Google Search and YouTube.

A proposed law, the News Media Bargaining Code, would force us to provide you with a dramatically worse Google Search and YouTube, could lead to your data being handed over to big news businesses, and would put the free services you use at risk in Australia.

# The way Aussies search every day on Google is at risk from new regulation

You’ve always relied on Google Search and YouTube to show you what’s most relevant and helpful to you. We could no longer guarantee that under this law. The law would force us to give an unfair advantage to one group of businesses - news media businesses - over everyone else who has a website, YouTube channel or small business. News media businesses alone would be given information that would help them artificially inflate their ranking over everyone else, even when someone else provides a better result. We’ve always treated all website owners fairly when it comes to information we share about ranking. The proposed changes are not fair and they mean that Google Search results and YouTube will be worse for you.

# Your Search data may be at risk

You trust us with your data and our job is to keep it safe. Under this law, Google has to tell news media businesses “how they can gain access” to data about your use of our products. There’s no way of knowing if any data handed over would be protected, or how it might be used by news media businesses.

# Hurting the free services you use

We deeply believe in the importance of news to society. We partner closely with Australian news media businesses — we already pay them millions of dollars and send them billions of free clicks every year. We’ve offered to pay more to license content. But rather than encouraging these types of partnerships, the law is set up to give big media companies special treatment and to encourage them to make enormous and unreasonable demands that would put our free services at risk.

This law wouldn’t just impact the way Google and YouTube work with news media businesses — it would impact all of our Australian users, so we wanted to let you know. We’re going to do everything we possibly can to get this proposal changed so we can protect how Search and YouTube work for you in Australia and continue to build constructive partnerships with news media businesses — not choose one over the other.

You’ll hear more from us in the coming days — stay tuned.

louisstowon Bitwarden second security audit report

I love the concept of making this public but I feel like the audit wasn't very thorough if all it suggested was two security headers that a free online scanner could have picked up.

louisstowon TaBERT: A new model for understanding queries over tabular data

Does anything like this exist for XML documents? Wonder if it could be used for identifying interesting information in web pages.

louisstowon My productivity app for the past 12 years has been a single .txt file

I'm working on an programmable version of something like this: https://qworp.com

louisstowon Show HN: MNML – 1v1 turn-based strategy game built with Rust and HTML5

Hey, I visited your booth at PAX last month. I had no idea it was web-based. Congrats on the release!

louisstowon Show HN: Enter your URL and view CVEs affecting your stack over last 6 months

We don't store anyones IP address and the results are only in memory cached.

louisstowon Show HN: Enter your URL and view CVEs affecting your stack over last 6 months

Thanks. Increased the thread size so hopefully that should save it from all these hugs.

louisstowon Show HN: Enter your URL and view CVEs affecting your stack over last 6 months

It's always a possibility but this tool doesn't look for version numbers so it's then more time consuming to narrow down if it's vulnerable to something.

louisstowon Ask HN: What are you working on?

Thanks! If you have any suggestions feel free to get in touch (info@secalerts.co)

louisstowon Ask HN: What are you working on?

Been working on a weekly security newsletter customized to the subscribers software stack. It includes vulnerabilities and security news and it's 100% free: https://secalerts.co

louisstowon We are rewriting CodeMirror

Hi Marijn. Big fan of ProseMirror. Would you look at building CodeMirror on top of (or at least sharing code with) ProseMirror so both projects can benefit from the effort?

louisstowon Craft: A simple Minecraft clone written in C using OpenGL shaders

I actually compiled this project to Emscripten a few years back:

http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ingame-data/emcraft/game.h...

Here's the code: https://github.com/louisstow/EmCraft

louisstowon Ask HN: Projects that don't make you money but you're doing it out of sheer joy?

https://walloftext.co

I genuinely find it useful for note-taking and organising things.